What about "free (or dirt cheap) needs, work for wants" system?
As a believer in a 'basic income' system, this is in essence exactly what I think we need to start implementing. Those who would say that this sort of approach causes runaway inflation would be very surprised to learn that it actually has an opposite effect for many reasons. I once believed it would cause this too but the logic makes sense as to why it doesn't and then there are cases where this has actually, if not unintentionally, been implemented and the results were extremely healthy to the economy as a whole, the benefits being extraordinary for all levels, including the wealthy who actually find they have much more to gain from a populace they can now market more goods and services to.
Personally, I tend to view the rich as people who act in self interest, instead of evil.
Sure, I don't think most of them are evil. But past a point you get into a social network that believes that the commoner is nothing more than an animal and certainly no more valuable than that. They begin to truly believe they're lives are worth more because they have more 'net worth'. It's probably a hard outlook to avoid. Tends to be only the 'new money' folks object to this viewpoint. When you see things like this, it's not hard to think of most humans as being only valuable if they can provide something for you.
I'm not aware of talks if humans are more complex than a turing machine, but we sure don't know how to get more information about how we work. If there is an intrinsic bug in the wiring, we may never be able to figure it without outside help.
The interaction of networking and specialized evaluations are what overcome this for us and what would for AI as well. It can be necessary to get outside feedback to understand a problem.
My commanders never did like it when I pointed it out that the army was a slave-army
Yeah, mine didn't appreciate it much either. lol
That's completely different - and I'm not saying these walls are good. But one thing resembles a private estate (walls to keep people out), the other resembles a prison.
But these walls, like any other, craft the flow of human populations and redirect that flow. If we wanted more in and everyone wanted out, you can imaging the walls would be put up for the opposite reason. There's really no right or wrong to it, just the point to be made that governments are managing the herd with such tools.
like education vouchers (I hope I'm using the right term here), where there are several different private school systems, the parents get the vouchers and give them to the school where their kid goes. Then the school can get the funding from the state - this is of course not completely libertarian, but much more so than the current system. The schools can create their own curriculum, and only the exams are controlled by the public sector.
So the first thing you turn to is a social program to have the state provide vouchers? You contradict your own philosophy at a fundamental level that displays you recognize need for government services, no matter how you claim that government intervention is always negative. If schools are creating their own curriculum, then how can you ensure that some crazy stuff like flat earth theory isn't being spread about in the local schools? It appears the only thing you're advocating for is to remove the ability to demand a degree of quality. You would have that happen from some public sector controlled testing, but would that not then define the curriculum by defining the exam?
Then next (more libertarian) step would be to privatize the exams. Different exam organizations offer to let students take them, and graduate the students based on the results. After a while the HR people (and in fact the public) will know what are good exams. The downside to this is mostly the transition period where students and their parents don't yet know what are good exams, so they might need to take several.
And now we have unleashed the most direct path for all crackpots to shape the next generation according to whatever they feel they wish to teach. Truth will REALLY become a narrative and nothing more.
First I have to say that I have absolutely no personal experience of the place, so I'm relying on freely available information. I looked for both a place in North Idaho (from the map in Wikipedia I picked Sandpoint), and a large city not too far away (Seattle, WA). The direct distance according to Google is 350 miles. Now we are speaking about possibilities in the future, so I'm considering the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain with a speed of 4000 mph (conservative estimate). This means the travel would take 5.25 minutes, or if we add a bit of time for acceleration / deceleration - and perhaps the direct route cannot be taken, we are at 10 - 15 minutes, and you have reached a city with more than 600,000 inhabitants. Even if it is 30 minutes, that's still less time than it takes most people today to get to their job. In that regard the USA has one big advantage: A (more or less) common language. In Europe achieving the same thing would be a bit more difficult, but not impossible, given enough time. The vactrain has many advantages over both trains (speed) and airplanes (shorter boarding time), and - aside from the construction price - one drawback: If the vacuum tube is punctured by e.g. an act of terrorism, the results would be terrible, but not on a 9/11 scale (which is relevant when we are comparing with airplanes).
Interesting. Without getting into how this would just make Sandpoint an extension of Seattle, causing its housing values to skyrocket and the community to therefore suffer in other ways, (it would also be a benefit... the two locations would just diffuse their problems into one another mostly) one would have to have very wealthy people believing they would earn back more than they invest to put such a system in place (in a libertarian approach) OR for a state to determine that this would be a benefit to the whole. So either its going to enable the wealthy to demand a new fee to the lives of those who would use it (and those who cannot come up with that fee get to suffer from the elevated cost of living in their local community) or the state would need to invest. You might have an interesting idea for someone to make some money, but you'd have to already have more money than anyone needs to put such a system in place. And as you explain there are major risks, making the likelihood of such a thing manifesting very unlikely. They've talked about such a tube between Vegas and LA quite frequently but it never does happen.
I assume you were drafted, otherwise this wouldn't make sense at all.
Doesn't matter if one enters slavery willingly or not, it's still slavery. Most slaves in history have been those who have willingly entered slavery due to their economic circumstances in an otherwise libertarian society being too dire to continue to survive - it was most often a form of individual level capitulation to someone who could help you stay alive but would use you to the fullest extent they could imagine. This was what the rise of serfdom in the medieval was all about. The wonders of a system that has very little governmental influence to provide basic protections for human rights.
ut even conscripts are paid, and the government usually wants them in good health, whereas people in forced labor are often kept in much worse conditions, health-wise.
True, slaves are pushed hard but the manner in which slaves are maintained has a lot to do with the wisdom of the owner and a wise owner would keep them as healthy as possible. Like the government does. True, those in the military are paid. Often slaves were given a stipend as well. Not usually one as good as a soldier's but you certainly don't join the military for the money. But what's nice about being in the military is that you don't have to worry about your basic needs. You will always have medical care, always have food, always have a roof over your head and if you didn't want for much you could save nearly every penny you are paid. Thus until recently most soldiers in the US have not even made a minimum wage rate if tallied up.
It's close, but you're right that it's not exactly the same. What IS exactly the same is privatized prison systems, another whopper of a libertarian concept.
I'm not saying that there are no problems, only that there are less problems than with other systems.
Yeah but there are a few 'problems' that black ball a system in my opinion, and the ability for someone to be starve to death on the street (and I commonly see some homeless here in Vegas that are always within days of that fate) unless someone with some wealth takes some pity on them, is not an acceptable degree of 'flaw'.
And the last thing you want is making hiring impossible, for the exact same reasons you give. And this point is only a part of a whole, where you have better schools, less red tape when founding new companies, a much better infrastructure where you can (in the end) seek a job pretty much in the entire country without having to move.
When the wealth divide gets to a critical point, this will begin being the natural conclusion. Why would the rich employ many people when the people in the market have so little to give that hardly any industry can be made profitable?
And please remember that I'm actually against strict IP laws, so building up competition should be easier as well.
Double edged sword there. If you don't have stiff IP laws, then you have NO hope of starting a new business because whatever makes you competitively differentiable from a larger company will simply be adopted overnight and deployed easier by those larger competitors and you will be priced out by a larger investor who has so much capital on hand that they can afford to run in the red for as long as it takes to destroy you... pretty much what Wal-mart did to all local small business competition wherever they setup shop.
which can mean that there is more for everyone
But in practice generally doesn't.
That wasn't really a concern of these governments, was it?
No... which is why there was such a huge uprising against tyranny during the Renaissance,
I just wanted to point out that people freely chose to help other people, although the government was more of a hindrance than a help - these "samaritans" still had to pay their taxes.
You have a lot of faith in charity. But a system that relies on charity is setup for a huge array of fraud and even legal manipulations that amount to corruption. Take for example the companies here in Vegas that make a living calling people to solicit donations for 'charities' and other non-profits. They are required to 'pledge' an amount, say 100k for the year, that they will donate to the non-profit company they are collecting donations for. Once they have collected that amount, all additional amounts collected they get to pocket. The employees making the calls make pretty close to minimum wage of course. So when the company collects some 1 million for the year telling people that they are collecting donations for said non-profit, they give that non-profit 100k, cover their 100k more in expenses such as employees (or less) and the cost of the building and the phone bill and so on, and then they pocket the rest of the 800k that people gave in the name of what they figured was a good cause.
All completely legally because regulations AREN'T in place to enforce a more fair system. But hey, we made more terrible jobs for folks so it must be a good thing.
Just that this revolution was not one of the bloodier ones. It could have been much worse, and we only need to look at France at the same time to see an example.
True. Didn't get that bloody until we decided to commit as much genocide as we could towards the folks who were already here. My point was that revolution and nation building is always a blood soaked prospect.
A - hypothetical -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_society is classless, and this is what communism claimed as its final goal. I admit that I used Lenin's definition, for which I quote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism:
A classless society would be great but I don't think it can really be done because we are meant to specialize and as soon as we are different from someone else we are classifiable. I don't believe a lot of the values of communism can really be achieved. But I don't blame anyone for recognizing a problem with bourgeois corruption. I don't tend to take the term socialism as being all that related to communism as a movement.
I also do NOT believe that we should pool all possessions. I believe that we need to redistribute raw wealth so as to provide for the needs of the people, needs being defined as NEED, and not want. I personally would not wish to have to take anything from that system if I could help it. I don't usually file for any benefits I could, like food stamps or other. If I don't NEED it, I don't want to take it from a government that could probably use it better elsewhere. And I'd be pretty against any society that believes all you possess is subject to state confiscation. I'm simply talking about the wisest possible, responsible and compassionate application of taxation. Instead, what we get here is a huge amount of social wealth redistribution going to pay for nothing but weapons weapons and more weapons. We're either paranoid or wishing we could be far more hostile and aggressive than we currently can get away with. And we don't care how many citizens we have to bury as long as we have the sustained ability to bully around the rest of the world in the name of 'good' and 'free' democracy. What's so good about it if we're going to just let people die when they are no longer able to add to the GDP? Isn't the point of a military 'defense' of the nation? What are we protecting them from outside countries from when it's our own wealthy that are taking everything the nation has?
Oooooooooooohhhh noooo!!!! The world in 100 years will be completely different. Like.. completely! 100 years ago, there were no smartphones, no AI, no internet, no "real" computers, no airliners, no ubiquitinous cars, no gene technology, no modern healthcare, not even TVs or normal telephones (at least widespread), no widespread household electronics... Technological progress getting faster and faster, the more we know. Our current level of technology helps to build us the next, and the next the one after that. It is increasing at an ever faster pace, that's the law of accelerating returns. You see it in computations per second per constant dollars the best, but it is true for other techs as well. It is fastes in information techologies, and more and more technologies become information technologies: Biotechnology, Manufacturing (3d Printing), Medicine... In 100 years there will be several more doublings in techlevel; it is likely that the jump from now to 2120 is higher than the jump from 10.000 BC to today. It will be vastly faster as most humans will be upgraded and merged with computers (more than we are nowadays with smartphones already), life expectacy will reach it's escape velocity, leading to virtual immortality; VR and reality will merge and become indistinguishable (with ultrasound and more advance techs provide haptic feedback etc). There are sooooo many other areas that will be revolutionized by AI, robotics, nanotechnolgy and biotechnology: Food production (meat grown in labs and automated farm scrapers), communications (via virtual telepathy), transportations (hyperloop style hypersonic trains for example), medicine (prostesis and biotech/nanotech will most likely vipe off diseases and disablilities) and on and on and on.
I wasn't trying to say otherwise. It was proposed that it would take 100 years for human 'work' to be primarily obsoleted. I don't think it will take nearly that long given the rate of speed of automation taking over jobs. And a lot of humans simply aren't smart enough to keep finding more and more complex employment, particularly when education costs are skyrocketing and government is doing less than ever to help people afford these costs. Even then, I know a lot of people who simply wouldn't be able to jump through all the hoops they'd need to jump through to get a degree in anything.
One thing I've found since being a kid though, I always expected we'd be a lot more advanced by now than we actually are.
". I look at it, and I tell you that you did a sloppy job (=bug), I expected this "
". At no point you could've known which of the smileys I was referring to.
Or b) I would say you basically have a second-class citizen category that the slave-owning class underpays for their labor, and I think this can actually apply to both chattel slavery and other slavery systems where slaves could rise up in the ranks to even prominent societal positions. Some way or other the slave owners are short-changing the slaves somehow, and the easiest way to think about that is simply that the slave owners are underpaying them compared to the true amount of wages (or freedoms) they deserve if they were not slaves but working in the same positions. Underpaying means the prices of goods would be lower than if all the slaves were paid their "true" wages. But deflation/inflation is CHANGE in the price of goods. So the price of goods would be lower in a slave society compared to a non-slave society, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there will be continuous change in the price of goods, which is what inflation/deflation is. So IMHO, the slavery civic should make things "cheaper" for the player to produce - so something like a +x% production boost and a x% discount on unit upgrades. There should be some malus to happiness. I don't know if it makes sense to give maluses to other things like science for having slavery - ancient societies weren't exactly harnessing the common man, even if they weren't slaves, for their brains - that should only come much later in the tech tree. And if you think about societies that allowed slaves to rise up in the societal ranks, those societies could probably have smart slaves, too. (Edit: if you want to think of slavery as short-changing people of their freedoms, I would think of it as slaves being unable to participate in society as much as free people, i.e. they are restricted from spending as much in society. If you restrict a group of people from spending wealth, then the price level of goods may be lower, but again, not necessarily a continuous change in price of goods/inflation/deflation. Restricted freedoms I would say can be proxied with a malus to commerce, if desired.)
